Fresbo
Fresbo, is a young startup started on 2 June 2006. There are 4 founders and fresh graduates from college. They wanted to do something different from our peers and decided to start a company that builds virtual world. One of the founders left in the midst due to differences and own personal self-interests. Fresbo World is the first game that they built and released in January 2008. Fresbo World became the top game in Friendster soon after its release. Subsequently Fresbo World was changed into Ninerift, and Fresbo was awarded a cash grant by MDA to further develop Fresbo World / Ninerift. Fresbo - Ninerift Notorand and Gvinto ( Founders of Fresbo World / Ninerift ) were the original people behind the idea of this game , and they are looking for investors to fund it. However the requirement for funding is that they are a registered company. So they got to think of a company name quick! While they are walking around and saw a guy on a bus wearing a t-shirt with the words "FreshBox". Notorand and Gvinto just remove some letters and that where they get the name "Fresbo". When Fresbo World first launched in 31th Dec 2007, it was really bare and empty, and it first started off in Facebook. They did not get much users in the beginning, only a few sign up each day, and none of them actually stayed more than a minute. It had less than 2 concurrent users at any one time. They realized that it was really due to lack of features, and they had to work on bringing more things to the game to attract people to play. We tried a few things, adding new environments, adding console games, and more significantly, pass the bomb. As they added more features, the users climbed slowly, and it reached around 70-80 people during the morning hours of 8-9am. Most of the players are from America, and they are of matured age of 17-20. Then the game was launched in Friendster, things start to change. The Philippines players came on real fast. The concurrent users increase by 100 each week. During the time of April to May, our max concurrent users reached 600-700 plus. And it was during that time, all the Facebook American users start to leave, cause the Philippines users spoke Tagalog, which most of the existing users do not understand. And they came in sheer overwhelming numbers which basically dominates and shift the game towards a different spectrum. Most of the them are kids ranging from 8-12, which did not fit the 17-20 age of the American users, and since it was a socializing game, this is definitely a tricky problem. The developers tried splitting the world up into realms, however it did not solve the problem, maybe it was too late by the time we did that. The new demographic of users 8-12 Philippines users basically are the Habbo Hotel users. Cause Habbo did not go to Philippines, they filled the gap there. It wasn't planned and we did not know how to handle from there. So we started to observe how Habbo does it, and we tried to satisfy this group of users the same way. However, we simply do not understand why people play Habbo Hotel. The Developers will introduce features that we do not understand it ourselves. To differentiate from Habbo, they also introduced the Lego aspect of building a home. We are impressed with what the users are building with the unit stacker that we introduced, and decided maybe this Lego feature that is not found in other games, will make us a hit and unique from the rest. Apparently, this is not really the case. Our observation shows that only a small group of the users actually decorate anything in the first place. Most of them are only interested in chatting and picking up friends. Only girls will be the one decorating, and Lego building might not be appealing to them at all, cause it is too tedious and troublesome. That is the time that they decided to move in an another direction : MMORPG. Again, it will be back to the same question : If the developers are doing a MMORPG, what is it that will differentiate from the rest of the games so that people will play the game? This made them stuck for quite a long time, around a year's time. They decided that maybe the below combination of features will make them different from the rest *No large download, no install, convenience of playing right in the browser *Polished graphics, makes the player want to explore, even with no download *Want to play a MMORPG, but do not have the time to invest in a full-range one like WOW (above 25 yr old) *Want to play a MMORPG, but sick of the same old game play found in majority of the MMORPG existing in the market already (13-25 yr old) Staff *Founders **Notorand (Low Bingjiang) **Cymric (Chen Qin) **Zhongwei (Deng Zhongwei) *Game Moderator **ConnieT *Forum Moderator **NiuNiu **ThomasBoss **Stormheart Category:Ninerift